ADDRESS OF HONORABLE ELIHU ROOT, 
L SECRETARY OF STATE, AT THE 
BANQUET OF THE CANADIAN CLUB OF 
OTTAWA, CANADA, JANUARY 22, 1907. 



ADDRESS OF HONORABLE ELIHU ROOT, 
L SECRETARY OF STATE, AT THE 
BANQUET OF THE CANADIAN CLUB OF 
OTTAWA, CANADA, JANUARY 22, 1907. 



MAR 10 mi 



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Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, Sir IVilfrid, 
Gentlemen of the Canadian Club of Ottawa: 
I thank you for your most cordial and 
friendly greeting. 1 beg you to believe that 
1 am deeply sensible of the honor conferred 
upon me by the presence at this luncheon table 
of the Governor-General and the Premier of 
Canada. Another kindly greeting has been 
received by me, since 1 took my seat at the 
table, from a gentleman who, for reasons which 
you will readily appreciate, was unable to ob- 
tain a seat in the room. I will take the liberty 
of reading it to you. It is a telegraphic dispatch 
dated Jamaica, January 20, received in Wash- 
ington yesterday and repeated to me: 

Honorable Elihu Root, 

Secretary of State. 
Jamaica profoundly grateful to your excellency for ex- 
pression of 'sympathy and for the very practical aid so 
kindly given by Admiral Davis and the entire particular 
service squadron of the United States Government. 
(Signed) Governor Swettenham. 

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I do not feel at all a stranger here, partly 
perhaps because in your climate blood has to 
be thicker than water; partly because in your 
atmosphere everyone born and bred under the 
common law of England and under the princi- 
ples of justice and liberty that the English- 
speaking race has carried the world over, 
wherever it has gone, must breathe freely. It 
is a full forty years since I paid my first visit to 
Canada. At brief intervals during all that period 
I have been returning, sometimes to one part 
of the Dominion and sometimes to another, but 
always keeping in touch with the course of your 
development and with the trend of your opinion 
and spirit. During that time what wonderful 
things we have seen! We have seen feeble, ill- 
compacted, separate, dependent colonies grow- 
ing into a great and vigorous nation. We 
have seen the two branches of the Canadian 
people, the English speaking and the French 
speaking, putting behind them old resentments 
and steadily approaching each other in tightening 
bonds of sympathy and national fellowship — a 
happy augury for the continuance of that entente 
cordiale which between the two great nations 



on the other side of the Atlantic is making for 
the peace of the world. We have seen not 
merely growth in population and in wealth, 
but we have seen here great examples of con- 
structive power, examples of a great race of 
builders who have made and are making and 
are to make the Western World unexampled in 
the history of mankind. The spirit of the Norse 
sea kings, the spirit of the great navigators, of 
Columbus, of Vasco da Gama, and of Drake and 
Frobisher, the spirit of the Spanish conquista- 
dores, the spirit of men of power and might 
who have been the great influences in the world, 
has found its development in this Western 
Hemisphere in the great builders, and within 
our lives we have seen here some of the great- 
est of the great building men of constructive 
power and energy. We have seen and are see- 
ing now the growth of that historic sense, the 
growth among the people of that appreciation 
of the great examples of their own best nature 
which is so essential to the making of a nation; 
and as you are drawing away, through the 
course of successive generations, from the past 
the great figures of the makers of Canada loom 

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up more and still more lofty. The courage, 
the fortitude, the heroism, the self-devotion of 
the men of Canada's early time stand out in 
historic eminence from which well may flow 
the deep and unending stream of a great na- 
tional patriotism. Above all, we see a people 
trained and training themselves in the art of self- 
government, in the discussion and consideration 
of all public questions, not only in the high 
seats of government, but in the farmhouse and 
the shop; in that discussion which lies at the 
base of modern civilization, that discussion 
which among the plain people, furnishing the 
basis for political and social systems, differen- 
tiates our later-day civilization from all the 
civilizations of the past, and must give to it 
a perpetuity that no civilization of the past 
has had. 

Lord Grey has very kindly furnished me, in 
the last few days, with the debate which has 
been going on in your House of Commons on 
the subject of the fisheries modus vivendi. I 
have been much impressed by the thoughtful, 
temperate, and statesmanlike quality which has 
been conspicuous in that debate. 1 am sure, 

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and indeed no one who reads tlie debate can 
doubt, that whatever conclusion your Parliament 
reaches will be a conclusion dictated by sincere 
and intelligent and right-minded determination 
to fulfill the full duty of your representatives 
to the people whose rights they are bound to 
maintain and protect. Whatever the conclusion 
may be, however much any may differ from it, 
all men will be bound to respect it. The exist- 
ence of this club, the existence of similar clubs 
in the great cities throughout your country, is 
an augury, a good omen, for the future of Can- 
ada. That intelligent discussion and considera- 
tion of public questions which enables the men 
who are not in office to perform their duty as 
self-governors is a solid foundation for a nation 
that shall endure. 

For all these I profess, with sincerity and 
with feeling, my admiration and my sympathy; 
and 1 speak the sentiment of millions of my own 
countrymen in saying that we look upon the 
great material and spiritual progress of Canada 
with no feelings of jealousy, but with admira- 
tion, with hope, and with gratification. 1 count 
myself happy to be one of those who can not 

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be indifferent to the glories and achievements 
of the race from which they spring. And with 
my pride in my own land, with the pride that 
it is a part of my inheritance to take in England, 
is added the pride that I feel in this great, 
hardy, vigorous, self-governing people of Can- 
ada, who love justice and liberty. 

There have been in the past, and in the na- 
ture of things there will be continually arising 
in the future, matters of difference between the 
two nations. How could it be otherwise, with 
adjacent seacoasts and more than three thou- 
sand miles of boundary upon which we march ? 
How could it be otherwise in the nature of the 
races at work? Savage nature is never subdued 
to the uses of man, empires are never builded, 
save by men of vigor and power, men intense 
in the pursuit of their objects, strong in their 
confidence in their own opinions, engrossed in 
the pursuit of their ends, sometimes even to the 
exclusion of thoughtfulness for the interests and 
feelings of others. But let us school ourselves 
and teach our children, to believe that whatever 
differences arise, different understandings as to 
the facts on different sides of the boundary line, 

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the effect of different environment, different 
points of view, rather than intentional or con- 
scious unfairness, are at the base of the differ- 
ences. After all, as we look back over the 
records of history; after all, in the far view of 
the future, all the differences of each day and 
generation are but trifling compared with the 
great fact that these two nations are pursuing 
the same ideals of liberty and justice, are doing 
their work side by side for the peace and 
righteousness of the world in peace with each 
other. 

The differences of each generation loom 
large, held close to the eye; but, after all, the 
fact that for ninety years, under a simple ex- 
change of notes limiting the armament of the 
two countries, in terms which have become an 
antiquated example of naval literature, to single 
1 00-ton boats with single 1 8-pound cannon- 
after all, the fact that for ninety years under 
that simple exchange of notes we have been 
living on either side of this three thousand 
miles of boundary in peace, with no more 
thought or fear of hostilities than if we were 
the same people, is a great fact in history and 



a great fact of potential import for the future. 
We celebrate great victories. Anniversaries of 
great single events call together crowds and are 
the subject of inspiring addresses. Within a 
few years — eight years from now — we shall be 
able to celebrate the centennial anniversary of 
a hundred years of peaceful fellowship — a hun- 
dred years during which no part of the fruits of 
industry and enterprise has been diverted from 
the building up of peaceful and happy homes, 
from the exercise and promotion of religion, 
from the education of children and the succor 
of the distressed and unfortunate, to be ex- 
pended in warlike attack by one people upon 
the other. 

In the meantime, our people are passing in 
great numbers across this invisible boundary, 
Canadians in the East and Americans in the 
West; and in thousands of homes they and 
their children are looking back from American 
hillsides to a Canadian, and from Canadian 
farms to an American, fatherland. May that 
backward look of loving memory never be 
turned to the hard gaze of hostility, of fear, 
or of revenge! 1 ask you, my friends, to join 

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me in a sentiment: To the Canadian settlers in 
New England and the American settlers in the 
Canadian West— may they ever, with loyal 
memory, do honor to the lands of their birth! 
may they ever, with loyal citizenship, do God s 
service to IJie countries of their adoption! 



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